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Brunetto Latini (c.1220 - 1294), who signed his name Burnectus Latinus in Latin and Burnecto Latino in Italian, was an Italian philosopher, scholar and statesman.

He was born in Florence, the son of Buonaccorso Latini. He belonged to the Guelph party. After the disaster of Montaperti, which took place while he was on embassy to Alfonso el Sabio of Castile to seek help for Florence against the Sienese, he took refuge for some years (1260-1266) in France, but in 1266, he returned to Tuscany and for some twenty years held successive high offices. Giovanni Villani says that he was a great philosopher and a consummate master of rhetoric, not only in knowing how to speak well, but how to write well. He was the author of various works in prose and verse.

While in France, he wrote his Italian Tesoretto and in French his prose Tresor, both summaries of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the day (the Italian 13th-century translation known as Tesoro was misattributed to Bono Giamboni). He also translated into Italian the Rettorica and three orations by Cicero. The Italian translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, is often misattributed to Brunetto Latini: it is a work of Taddeo Alderotti instead.

He is famous as the friend, teacher and counsellor of Dante Alighieri, who immortalized him in The Divine Comedy (see Inferno, XV. 82-87). Dante places Latini with in the third ring of the Seventh Circle with the Sodomites. Dante writes: "clerks and great and famous scholars, defiled in the world by one and the same sin" presumably of sodomy. According to John D. Sinclair Dante respected Latini immensely but nonetheless felt it necessary to place him with the sodomites since, according to Sinclair, this sin of Latini's was well known in Florence at the time. Other critics point to the fact that outside of the D.C., Latini is no where else accused of Sodomy. Some therefore have suggested that Latini is placed in Canto XV for being violent against art (Latini wrote in French instead of Florentine) or perhaps also to demonstrate that even the greatest of men may be guilty of private sins.

Many of the characters in Dante's Inferno can also be found as flesh and blood persons amongst the legal and diplomatic documents Brunetto Latino wrote in Latin.

• Catholic Encyclopedia: Brunetto Latini

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• [1]: Website on Brunetto Latino